Free Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

around the ring of the half-full wine glass so that the sound seemed to hold out a taut meditation between us which I could not sever, could not take my finger from. Silk kimonos and hushed peignoirs and a poem by Wallace Stevens. I blush to tell you even now what I thought then because—but you know, you knew—to tell you about seeing silk kimonos and courtesans is to tell you of books, and dust, and seduction, to tell you now that it is too late, that even then I was already in your bed, or you were in mine. Again. Yes, that was your story and mine, as it wrote itself, as it wound itself into sheets and stories through Cambridge winter afternoons as the shadows lengthened. How much seduction was in the air; even then, even in that lunch amid the eggplant and chickpeas and the smoke from the Sunday market.
    “I propose to pay you a salary for six months. No, no, don’t laugh. Don’t dismiss it. I am making a business proposition: you have made others like it, I know. I’m asking you to finish my mother’s book between now and the spring; that’s around six months. It might not even need that long. It’s practically finished as far as I can see. Her footnotes look impeccable, as always.”
    “But I live in Brighton. Elizabeth had notes and papers. I would need libraries and access to her books…”
    “I’ve thought about that. It makes sense for you to live in The Studio while you’re writing. It’s obvious. All the books you could possibly need are there, and it’s only a half-hour walk from The Studio to the University Library. Pepys is still there. A neighbour has been feeding him.”
    “You want me to live in Elizabeth’s house? But if there’s more research to be done—how…? I’m not a proper historian, Cameron. You know that.”
    “You won’t need to be a historian. She’s done all the research. There are a couple of incomplete chapters, but there are files with notes for each of those. The rest just needs redrafting and editing. The manuscript is in her computer; there’s a printout on her desk.”
    “Have you read it?”
    “No, I can’t bear to. But I have glanced through it, just to see what sort of state it was in.”
    “And?” I was biting my nails.
    “Well, it reads well. The bulk of it covers Newton’s life from 1661, when he arrived in Cambridge, to 1667, when he was given his fellowship. Like a mini-biography. It’s very detailed.”
    “Just six years? Why those years in particular?”
    “Alchemy. She was using Newton as a way of showing how all those European alchemical networks and secret societies hung together. That’s how I always understood it, anyway. She wanted to challenge that myth of Newton as a lone genius, working completely in isolation. It was a passion to her—she hated all those genius myths and eureka moments in the history of science books. She talked about it a lot. She wanted to show how much, like all other scientists in the seventeenth century, Newton depended upon European secret societies, Freemasons and alchemists, groups of men in The Hague and in London and Cambridge and Paris. That he wasn’t in isolation and that the network to which he belonged controlled him in some ways, too.”
    “Depended on them for what?”
    “Oh, for almost everything—for knowledge, secret manuscripts, books, libraries, scientific instruments, patronage, formulas, introductions to other people. Newton was apparently connected up to a group of alchemists working in London and Cambridge. She’d been tracking them down one by one. She had an index-card box full of their names and dates. Some of them were easy to identify apparently, but others just had code names like ‘Mr. F.’ or initials like ‘W.S.’ or pseudonyms like ‘Philalethes.’ She was working on identifying some of the last alchemists in Newton’s circle when I last spoke with her, just before she died. I helped her with some of it.”
    “OK. Sounds interesting. That does happen to be a decade I